Hot Topics:

Longmont-area locations carry history in their names

Scott Rochat Longmont Times-Call

Posted:
03/25/2012 03:00:00 AM MDT

Updated:
04/16/2012 06:05:39 PM MDT

Firestone Trustee Paul Sorensen shows off an old photo of town namesake Jacob H. Firestone with his wife, Adaline. The town s name is one of many in the region whose origins are less obvious than they might appear. (Greg Lindstrom/Times-Call)
(
Greg Lindstrom
)

He knew that's where his small Colorado town had supposedly gotten its name. But he couldn't find proof. Even while preparing for Firestone's 2007 centennial, the sole mention appeared to be one sentence in a 1978 history: "Jacob Firestone of the Firestone Rubber Co. once owned the land on which the town now sits."

"One other story was that 'fire stone' was another word for coal," said Sorensen, a Firestone trustee and member of the Carbon Valley Historical Society. "And if I wasn't able to find a connection, that's what I was going for."

The uncertainty is understandable. After all, a number of Longmont-area places have names that are less than clear to a newcomer. Gay Street has nothing to do with happiness or orientation. Lyons has no connection with the identically named city in France. And just what was so clean about Hygiene, anyway?

Most of the time, all it takes is a little digging. Appropriately enough in the case of Jacob Firestone, who was no myth, but was connected to the town's coal company, not the rubber and tire giant.

"When I was researching him, I took Harvey Firestone (the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. founder) and went back three generations, then went back down all the lines to see if a 'Jacob H.' was related to them," Sorensen said. "If I had gone back one more generation, I would have found him."

Firestone

As it turned out, Jacob H. Firestone was related to Harvey only by marriage, and distantly at that. Founder of a general store and a still-operating bank in Spencer, Ohio, he had been one of the owners of the Firestone Coal and Land Co. A mention of Jacob in a 1910 set of minutes led Sorensen to check the town of Spencer about three years ago.

That turned up descendant Reid Firestone, a funeral director, semi-retired pastor and chairman of the Farmer Savings Bank, the bank that Jacob had founded. Reid turned up a photograph and still more information. The Firestones turned out to be related to the Buchanans -- as in Clarence Buchanan, the town's second mayor, for whom Buchanan Street was named.

"I was confident I had the right family here," Sorensen said.

In 2011, Reid Firestone became the first member of the family to visit Firestone, even giving a brief interview for a DVD about the town and its history. He told the Times-Call that the Colorado connection had been a surprise to him, too, since the Firestones tended to be "close-mouthed and close-knit."

"When I was 25 or 30, this might have been 'eh,' " he said in 2011. "But it's a lot more meaningful to me now. And I think it will be meaningful to my kids when they get older."

Niwot

"Niwot's Curse" has become part of Longmont lore -- the pronouncement by the Arapaho Chief Niwot that "people seeing the beauty of this valley will want to stay, and their staying will be the undoing of the beauty." These days, the popular version tends to run "Once you've lived here, you will always come back."

If Lefthand is in the name -- such as in Lefthand Brewing Co. -- the origin likely is with Chief Niwot. ((Times-Call file))

Niwot himself didn't come back. After initially objecting to the intrusion of gold-seekers into the area, he decided to welcome white settlement in the area, saying that one of his shamans had had a vision of a flood that swallowed the Arapaho but left the whites in place. That led to six years of co-existence, until the territorial government asked the tribe to relocate to Sand Creek. In 1864, the settlement was attacked by Union troops under Col. John Chivington in what became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. Chief Niwot was wounded in the massacre and died a few days later.

"He was known as a very peaceful chief," said Alyce Davis of the St. Vrain Historical Society. "That could be one reason why the name survives here, because he lived here, because he was known as a good man."

Sometime between 1900 and 1920, photographer Charles W. Boynton snapped this image of the men, women and children living at the Hygiene Sanitarium in Hygiene. The sanitarium treated tuberculosis patients from across the country who hoped Colorado s clean mountain air would help them recover from the bacterial infection that led to chronic coughing, weight loss, fevers, night sweats and possibly death. An effective antibiotic treatment was not available until the 1940s, long after Hygiene s sanitarium closed. (Photo courtesy of the Longmont Museum and Cultural Center)

The unincorporated community of Niwot was named for him in 1875. But many other landmarks and businesses bear the translation of his name, "Left Hand," including Left Hand Canyon, Left Hand Creek and even the Left Hand Brewing Co. -- the last of which started as Indian Peaks Brewing and changed its name to honor the chief after it found Indian Peaks was already in use by another microbrewery.

Hygiene

Hygiene, as many longtime residents know, got its name because of a disease that has recently re-entered the news: tuberculosis.

Organized in 1881 by the Rev.

Jacob Flory, the Hygienic House was meant to give TB sufferers a place where they could recover in thin, clean mountain air. There was a little validity to the claim -- the bacteria behind the lung disease thrives most in an oxygen-rich environment, though antibiotics have proved far more effective -- but getting that air could sometimes prove a little hazardous to the health as well.

"The cure for 'consumption' was thought to be that you had to sit outside 10 hours a day, whatever the weather," Davis said. "So you'll see reports of people sitting out there in a blizzard, with hot bricks under their blankets to keep them warm."

During its eight-year existence, the sanitarium would also claim miraculous cures from mineral water (said by skeptics to have come from a spring in back of the house) and a rare plant (which turned out to be ordinary mountain sage), according to "Hygiene, Colorado: From Hoofbeats to Pickups" by Diane Benedict. The building later became a hotel -- and according to some accounts, briefly an orphanage -- before its demolition in 1926.

Gay Street

Like many of the "core" Longmont streets, Gay Street owes its name to one of the leading figures of the Chicago-Colorado Colony that founded the city. Sydney Howard Gay was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, an abolition supporter who also found time to write several articles publicizing the new Western venture. He ended up serving as the vice president of the colony effort, though he never came to Longmont.

By a curious twist of history, Gay would be one of at least six newspapermen to give his name to a Longmont street. Joining him on the map were:

Elmer and Fred Beckwith (Beckwith Place), publishers of the Burlington Free Press. Elmer also would publish the Longmont Sentinel, and later the Longmont Weekly Times, a direct ancestor of the Times-Call.

Dr. C.M. Martin (Martin Street), a colony trustee and one of the earliest Longmont newspaper editors.

H.D. Emery (Emery Street), a reporter for the Prairie Farmer in Illinois and founder of the Illinois State Grange. Emery helped locate a site for the colony.

William Bross (Bross Street), publisher of the Democratic Press, a religious newspaper that merged with the Chicago Tribune. Bross became lieutenant governor of Illinois in 1864.

Ray Lanyon (Lanyon Lane), publisher of the Longmont Daily Times and then the Daily Times-Call after a 1931 merger. Lanyon also served as mayor of Longmont from 1931 until 1942.

Wedgewood Avenue

Most Longmonters know about the region of the "college streets" -- Harvard, Princeton, Bryn Mawr and so on. But what's that Wedgewood Avenue doing between Harvard Street and Cambridge Drive?

Believe it or not, city engineer Nick Wolfrum said after a little checking, it's yet another college. In this case, Wedgewood Memorial College in Staffordshire, England.

"I had never heard of Wedgewood College," Wolfrum laughed. "And the area up there seems to be more 'English streets' like Stratford, Danbury and Cambridge."

Dacono

Considered one of the more unusual town names in Colorado, Dacono is also one of the more controversial. According to "Green Light on the Tipple," by Eleanor Ayer, it's agreed that the word was created by coal company president Charles Lockard Baum from three women's names, Daisy, Cora and Nora. But while it's known that Daisy was Baum's wife, the other two names have been the source of some debate.

"The Rocky Mountain News reported in 1958 that the ladies were Baum's wife, a lady minister who married them and a very close friend," Ayer wrote. "The Farmer & Miner's talk with early residents in 1937 reports that the ladies were Baum's wife and his two sisters. A 1947 F&M story states that the ladies were Daisy (Baum) and two of her friends, Cora Van Voorhies and Nora Brooks."

Lyons

It has nothing to do with France. It doesn't even have much to do with Nathaniel Lyon, the first Union general killed in the Civil War. Instead, the town of Lyons owes its name to a man who knew good sandstone when he saw it.

Edward H. Lyon -- a cousin of Nathaniel -- had come to Colorado in 1880 from Putnam, Conn., for health reasons. As he rode to Red Hill, according to LaVerne Johnson of the Lyons Redstone Museum, he saw the St. Vrain Valley below him and fell in love with it.

"I saw for the first time the spot that looked good to me," Lyon wrote in a letter recounted in "That Beautiful Valley" by Frank Weaver.

That beautiful valley turned out to have a lot of red rock. Lyon's new ranch had 40 acres of lime rock and 40 acres of red sandstone, which led him to start a quarry. That early industry is still reflected in many of the town's businesses, such as the Redstone Review newspaper or the Redstone Cyclery bicycle shop.

Oligarchy Ditch

Dating back to 1866, the Oligarchy Ditch predates Longmont's own founding and is one of the oldest ditches to serve the area's farmers. The name, which appears on the ditch company's original application, appears to have come from a sense of honesty or irony -- "oligarchy" means government by a few, precisely the way most ditch companies tended to operate.

"My understanding is that the original people who created the Oligarchy chose that name for their intent," said Wes Lowrie of the city's water department.

Carbon Valley

Sometimes the obvious sources of a name are right. The Carbon Valley region of southwestern Weld County came from the prominent coal deposits in the region.

The coal seams were also rather sharply angled -- on the modern site of Saddleback Golf Course, they were only 50 feet below ground, but that dropped off to 150 feet at Firestone, 300 feet at Frederick and 500 feet at Dacono. The "walk-in" entrance to the highest deposits now sits at the bottom of a lake on the golf course.

Rachel Silbernagel, 8, dresses the part for the Miner s Day Parade in Frederick in September of 2011. The coal deposits that drew early miners to Frederick and other area towns led to the region s name, Carbon Valley; before that, one common name from the area was The Bluff, after the local landscape. (Times-Call file photo)
(
Joshua Buck/Times-Call
)

Article Comments

We reserve the right to remove any comment that violates our ground rules, is spammy, NSFW, defamatory, rude, reckless to the community, etc.

We expect everyone to be respectful of other commenters. It's fine to have differences of opinion, but there's no need to act like a jerk.

Use your own words (don't copy and paste from elsewhere), be honest and don't pretend to be someone (or something) you're not.

Our commenting section is self-policing, so if you see a comment that violates our ground rules, flag it (mouse over to the far right of the commenter's name until you see the flag symbol and click that), then we'll review it.

The Boulder alt-country band gives its EPs names such as Death and Resurrection, and its songs bear the mark of hard truths and sin. But the punk energy behind the playing, and the sense that it's all in good fun, make it OK to dance to a song like "Death." Full Story